AGNITIO provides support for the National Center for Media Forensics

ARLINGTON, VA – July 11, 2011
AGNITIO Corp., (www.agnitio.us) the leader in Forensic Speaker Recognition, proudly announced today collaboration with the National Center for Media Forensics (NCMF) in the College of Arts & Media at the University of Colorado Denver. Graduate students in the Master’s of Science in Recording Arts emphasis in Media Forensics program at the NCMF work with evidence from recorded audio, image, and video media and will use AGNITIO’s BATVOX to learn how to verify speaker identity from audio evidence.

“Automatic speaker recognition is a major domain of forensic audio that has changed a lot in the last 20 years,” said Catalin Grigoras, Ph.D., Director of the NCMF. “We are proud to teach our students the latest developments in the field through building voice databases and applying advanced techniques for statistics and signal processing using AGNITIO biometric systems.” Grigoras will lead students through the BATVOX interface while demonstrating work with sample evidence and stressing the importance of rigorous scientific testing.

The Master’s program at the NCMF prepares students for careers in state and federal law enforcement as well as in the private sector to fight crime and domestic threats using skills in media forensics. Students complete a Master’s of Science degree where the typical 16-month program includes many hours of hands-on lab work and culminates in a research thesis and an internship in a forensic lab.
“Through our collaboration with AGNITIO we now have BATVOX licenses for all of our students,” said Jeff M. Smith, Associate Director of the NCMF. ”Now they can work with the state of the art in speaker recognition and we can continue to provide a wide breadth of preparation for forensic media expertise"

“AGNITIO offers each student an educational license in the classroom and the NCMF has one educational subscription to BATSchool that gives access to the full capabilities of the program as well as to all the resources of the school,” said Emilio Martinez, president and CEO of AGNITIO. “This way, students and instructors always have access to the current version of BATVOX and can perform a full biometric identification task with real-life examples.”

BATVOX is the standard tool for speaker recognition in forensic laboratories. Used in more than 25 countries across Europe and Latin America it is routinely used as part of forensic audio toolkits to present evidence in court. Annual User Meetings and International Workshops with scientific experts have created a worldwide community exploring and using the tool. According to Martinez this collaboration with the NCMF extends the BATVOX user community to the U.S. where interest in the use of forensic speaker recognition is growing rapidly. In the near future, the NCMF expects to host a scientific symposium on the topic.